Beyond nixCraft

6 Tools To Find Out Website Load Speed

last updated in Categories Apache, Beyond nixCraft, Business, Hardware, High performance computing, Howto, Linux, Linux desktop, Sys admin, Troubleshooting, UNIX, Windows, windows vista

Research shows that if your web pages take longer than 5 seconds to load, you lose 50% of your viewers and sales. As a UNIX admin often end users and web developers complain about website loading speed and timings. Usually, there is nothing wrong with my servers or server farm. Fancy java script and images / flash makes site pretty slow. These tools are useful to debug performance problems for sys admins, developers and end users. Here are six tools that can analyzes web pages and tells you why they are slow. Use the following tools to:

  • Make your site faster.
  • Debug site problem, especially client side and server side stuff.
  • Better user experience.
  • Improve the web.

Hacking Nokia Series 60 Phones with Linux

last updated in Categories Beyond nixCraft, Hardware, Links, Linux

This site details about how to use Nokia Series 60 phone under Linux systems. It also details what applications put on them. The site is quite informative and I’m able to play with my nokia. It covers the following topics for Nokia N95,Nokia 6630,Nokia 6600 and phones:

=> Configuration Details

=> Communicating with it via Linux

=> BlueTooth Applications & Uses

=> TCP/IP over BlueTooth

=> Software on it

=> Games on it

=> Writing For It

=> File Formats etc

Read more @ Nick’s Adventures with Series 60 Phones and Linux

Happy Diwali

last updated in Categories Beyond nixCraft, India

I’d like to wish all of our readers around the world and India, a safe and happy holiday season. Wishing each one of you a very happy and prosperous Diwali. Hope the light of this festive period shines in all of your life 🙂

I’m quite busy with decorating homes with lights, fireworks, distributing sweets and gifts. I’ll be out of the office spending time with friends and family until Monday, Nov- 13th, you can expect slightly longer comment approval and posting from me.

4 TB Hard disk by 2011

last updated in Categories Beyond nixCraft, File system, Hardware, Links

Few days back I got 2 x 1 TB hard disks to dump my data and move to another location. Hitachi achieves nanotechnology milestone for quadrupling terabyte hard drive. It further claims 4 terabyte (TB) desktop hard drive (and 1TB laptop hd) by 2011. The hard drive-maker said it has created the world’s smallest disk drive heads — about 2,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. Once upon time I was quite happy with 260M hard disk. A terabyte can hold the text of roughly 1 million books, 250 hours of high-definition video, or a quarter million songs.

Now just imagine a simple SATA RAID with 4 such drives that can give you dirt cheap commodity 12TB NAS powered by Linux / FreeNAS software. 🙂 Also watch out for the flash based hard disk. They use less power with good data transfer rate.

=> More information at : Hitachi: 4 terabyte hard drives by 2011

Notes from a freed.in ~ FOSS conference in New Delhi with videos

last updated in Categories Beyond nixCraft, GNU/Open source, India, News

I missed FOSS conference in New Delhi ~ over 700 people, two days of sheer fun, excitement and lots of FOSS 🙁 I was in Chennai.. anyway freed.in is the leading community event in the Indian sub-continent and the developing world, promoting freedom in technology, software and other related fields, and personal privacy. The annual event makes free and open source software more visible to the world, and shares its excitement with everybody. freed.in helps nurture the community and enables networking within and outside the community in a fun environment. The event strives towards seeding of new projects.

Mayank Sharma has posted news and videos here.

Do you sleep or take a nap at work?

last updated in Categories Beyond nixCraft, News, Sys admin

According to a new survey half of IT works admit sleeping on the job or kissing coworkers. Well I have never fallen asleep, but I know few co-workers currently suffering from sleep disorder. From the article:

And nearly half of techies also are apparently in the mood for love. Forty-seven percent of tech pros admit they’ve kissed a co-worker, according to the online survey of 5,700 U.S. workers, including 163 techies, conducted by Harris Interactive for job site CareerBuilder.com. Forty-nine percent of male techies say they’ve fallen asleep at work, while only 35% of women admitted doing so.

As for smooching, 44% of men techies say they’ve kissed a co-worker, while only 34% confessed to puckering up with a colleague.

However many business people or manager takes power nap / catnap. It offers some health benefit. According to wikipedia:

Since these seminal studies demonstrated that naps were as good as a night of sleep on some memory tasks, more sleep laboratories have reported similar results. A NASA study has found, however, that while naps improve memory functions, they do not aid basic alertness